Policy Briefs & Testimonies

Ambassador Doug Lute testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on March 13, 2019 about the indispensable role of NATO, the U.S.'s  greatest geo-strategic advantage over any potential competitors.  

The author analyzes the policy implications of the U.S. January 2019 Missile Defense Review.

Instead of trying to command maritime East Asia, the United States should focus on helping China’s neighbors deny China sea and air control in the region.

David H. Petraeus, retired four star general and former CIA director, testified before the House Armed Services Committee on "The State of the World," Feb. 1, 2017 

This written testimony to the UK Parliament's Defence Select Committee focuses on the continuing challenges posed to the United Kingdom by the weakness of state institutions and the resultant instability, civil war, and insurgency in the Middle East and North Africa. It argues that the spillover effects of this state weakness threaten the UK directly and the cohesion of its vital European security partnerships.To avoid a cycle of inaction followed by tardy and inappropriate over-reaction, the UK needs to work with its international partners to craft a strategy of sustained engagement towards the region.

Senior Fellow William Tobey testified before the Senate Foreign Relations committee discussing the history of past negotiations to prevent nuclear proliferation.

Improvements in military medicine are costly to implement, and their costs are often ignored. Governments must begin to adjust their estimates of the costs of war to include the effects of increases in nonfatal casualties.

The influence of oil on conflict is often poorly understood. In U.S. public debates about the 1991 and 2003 Iraq wars, both sides focused excessively on the question of whether the United States was fighting for possession of oil reserves; neither sought a broader understanding of how oil shaped the preconditions for war.

Why did violence decline in Iraq in 2007? Many credit the "surge," or the program of U.S. reinforcements and doctrinal changes that began in January 2007. Others cite the voluntary insurgent stand-downs of the Sunni Awakening or say that the violence had simply run its course after a wave of sectarian cleansing. Evidence drawn from recently declassified data on violence at local levels and a series of seventy structured interviews with coalition participants finds little support for the cleansing or Awakening theses. This analysis constitutes the first attempt to gather systematic evidence across space and time to help resolve this debate, and it shows that a synergistic interaction between the surge and the Awakening was required for violence to drop as quickly and widely as it did.

...[A]fter adopting a policy, decisionmakers should resist the temptation to marginalize any skeptics. Indeed, it may be advisable for someone to deliberately play the role of "devil's advocate" and question optimistic appraisals of likely outcomes. Following the 2002–03 decision to invade Iraq, U.S. war planners were extremely overconfident about the prospects for stabilizing the country. Skeptical voices were sidelined or excluded. If senior officials had anticipated the shift to implemental mind-sets and the associated overconfidence, a "devil's advocate" would have helped to challenge shaky assumptions behind the strategy.